Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Third Edition

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Third Edition

By: Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the most recent version of Xamarin.Forms to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. This new edition features Xamarin.Forms 4 updates, including CollectionView and RefreshView, new coverage of client-side validation, and updates on how to implement user authentication. Mastering Xamarin.Forms, Third Edition is one of the few Xamarin books structured around the development of a simple app from start to finish, beginning with a basic Xamarin.Forms app and going step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. This book introduces a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding, and then focuses on building a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. You’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization before testing the app logic through unit testing. Finally, you will learn how to add monitoring to your Xamarin.Forms projects to track crashes and analytics and gain a proactive edge on quality.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Visual Studio App Center

Visual Studio App Center is a service provided by Microsoft that offers a comprehensive mobile DevOps toolchain. One of the biggest barriers to entry when it comes to setting up DevOps tooling is the amount of configuration, integration, and maintenance that's involved. In my experience, setting up DevOps tools means integrating several services, writing tons of scripts, and, typically, dedicating a developer to maintaining the build server. App Center offers a streamlined solution that minimizes configuration and pretty much eliminates integration and maintenance, since it's a centralized and hosted service.

All of the components of App Center can be accessed via the App Center website or API. The monitoring components also require the App Center SDK to be included in your mobile app package. For Xamarin apps, the SDK is available via NuGet.

This chapter is primarily focused on the app monitoring tools within Visual Studio App Center...